The Return of the Emperor (Sten #6). Allan Cole

have been working on it for a number of years. We developed it specifically as a tool for archivists.”

      “So?” That was the fat Kraa, the blunter of the two—if that were possible.

      “We plan to sell it to governments. It should reduce document search time by forty percent or more.”

      There were murmurs around the room. They were catching Kyes’s drift, and all he was saying was true. If there was a lie, it was only in his real intentions.

      “I propose that Sr. Lagguth and I join forces,” Kyes said, “assuring us of meeting his stated goal. What do you think? I am quite open to any other suggestions.”

      There were none. The deal was done.

      As for the other matters—the blown Mantis mission to capture the admiral, the terrible conditions Kyes had witnessed on the streets of Prime World—they were left untouched. Kyes had gotten what he wanted.

      Only one other thing came up, and this fairly casually.

      “About this clottin’ two-year supply business,” the skinny Kraa said.

      “Yes?”

      “Me ‘n Sis, here, think we oughta try and stretch it.”

      “More rationing?” Lovett asked. “I think we’ve just about—”

      “Naw. Don’t be puttin’ words in me mush. Drakh on that.”

      “What then?”

      “We take it.”

      “From whom?” Kyes could not help but be drawn in by the fascinating discussion.

      “Who gives a clot?” the fat Kraa said. “Somebody that’s got a whole lot of it, that’s who. Can’t be that many.”

      “You mean steal it?” Malperin asked, also fascinated. “Just like that?”

      “Why not?” the skinny Kraa reasoned.

      Yes. They all agreed. Why not, indeed?

      CHAPTER SIX

      STEN’S FIRST STEP, once clear of Smallbridge, was to go to ground. Mahoney had a planned refuge—which Sten rejected. Sten had his own very secure hideout. Where—he hoped—Kilgour, if he had been warned in time, would meet him.

      The hideout was Farwestern, and there Sten saw firsthand the effect the dwindling of AM2 and the privy council’s incompetence at managing what fuel there was.

      Farwestern had been—and to a degree, still was—a shipping hub near the center of a galaxy. At one time it had provided everything a shipper could want—from shipyards to chandleries, recworlds to warehousing, hotels to emergency services, all cluttered in a system-wide assemblage of containers. “Containers” was about the most specific description that could be used, since the entrepreneurs who had gathered around Farwestern used everything from small asteroids to decommissioned and disarmed Imperial warships to house their businesses. Almost anything legal and absolutely anything illegal could be scored in and around Farwestern, including anonymity.

      Years earlier Sten and Alex, on one of their Mantis team missions, had run through Farwestern. They found its cheerful anarchy to their liking. Most especially, they fell in love with a small planetoid named Poppajoe. Poppajoe was jointly owned by a pair of rogues named Moretti and Manetti. Having acquired fortunes elsewhere under almost certainly shadowy circumstances, they had discovered Farwestern and decided that there was their home. The question was: what service could they provide that wasn’t available? The answer was luxury and invisibility.

      They reasoned that there would be beings passing through who would want to be well taken care of and might prefer that their presence not be broadcast. This applied to criminals as well as to executives on their way to make a deal best kept secret until the stock manipulations were complete.

      Moretti and Manetti had thrived in peace. In the recent war they had doubled their fortunes. Now times were a little hard. Not bad enough to drive them under, but ticklish. They survived because they were owed so many favors by so many beings, from magnates to tramp skippers.

      There were still people who needed the shadows. Moretti and Manetti catered to them. All room entrances were individual. Guests could dine publicly, or remain in their suites. Privacy was guaranteed. Their food was still the finest to be found—fine and simple, from Earth-steak to jellied hypoornin served in its own atmosphere and gravity.

      When Sten and Kilgour had run across Poppajoe, they had made a very quiet resolution that if things ever got Very Very Hairy, this would be their private rendezvous point.

      As Sten’s ship entered the Farwestern system, neither he nor Mahoney looked particularly military. As a matter of fact, neither looked particularly anything.

      Beings frequently go to too much trouble when they decide, for whatever reason, that they would rather not be recognized as themselves. All that is necessary—unless the person is unfortunately gifted with the face of a matinee idol or an abnormal body—is to appear (A) unlike who they really are; and (B) like no one in particular. Dress neither poorly nor expensively. Eat what everyone else is eating. Travel neither first class nor steerage. Try to become that mythical entity, the average citizen. Mercury Corps called the tactic, for some unknown reason, a “Great Lorenzo.”

      Sten and Mahoney were now businessmen, successful enough for their corporation to have provided them with fuel and a ship, but not so successful that they had their own pilot, and the ship was a little rundown at the edges. Three days’ work at a smuggler’s conversion yard had turned Sten’s gleaming white yacht into just another commercial/private—but only as long as no one looked at the engines or the com room, or figured out that some of the compartments were much tinier than they should have been, and that behind those bulkheads were enough arms to outfit a small army.

      Mahoney had worried that the ship could be traced by its numbers. Sten was glad to find that his ex-boss did not know everything. The ship and every serial-numbered item on it was trebly sterile—another product of Sten’s professional paranoia that was now paying off.

      So they arrived on Poppajoe and were greeted by Messrs. Moretti and Manetti as if they were both long-lost cousins and complete but respected strangers.

      Poppajoe may have been surviving, but Farwestern was not. Commercial travel was a trickle. Between the fuel shortages and the cutbacks in the military, even Imperial ships were a rarity. A lot of orbital stations had sealed their ports, and their people had gone dirtside to one of Farwestern’s planets or moved on.

      “But we will make it,” Moretti explained. “We’re like the old mining town that struck it rich. A group of émigrés moved in and discovered that no one likes to do his own washing. They were willing to provide the services. Eventually the minerals played out and the miners headed for the next strike. However, the laundrybeings stayed—and all became millionaires doing each other’s laundry.”

      He found that quite funny. Sten did not. What he saw, and had seen from the time he and Mahoney had fled Smallbridge, was the slow grinding down of the Empire. He had felt it going on even in his isolation on Smallbridge, but witnessing it was another thing. Beingkind was pulling in its horns—or was being forced to. Entropy was well and good as a thermodynamic principle. As a social phenomenon it was damned scary.

      Mahoney gave him as big a picture as he could—which was hardly complete, he admitted. Worlds, systems, clusters, even some galaxies had slipped out of contact. By choice, rejecting the hamwitted leadership of the council? By war? By—barely conceivable—disease?

      As Sten well knew, AM2 had been the skein holding the Empire together. Without the shattering energy release of Anti-Matter Two, star drives were almost impossible to power. And of course, since AM2 had been very inexpensive—price determined by the Emperor—and fairly available—depending on the Emperor, once more—it was easy to take the lazy way out and run anything and everything on the substance. Interstellar communications... weaponry... factories... manufacturing... the list ran on.

      When